Revision as of 23:09, 29 October 2008

III

SHOOTING CIVILIANS IN BELGIUM

AT 11 o'clock all further philosophizing was put a stop to;
we were ordered to halt, and we were to receive our food from
the field kitchen.

We were quite hungry and ate the tinned soup with the heartiest
of appetites. Many of our soldiers were sitting with their dinner-pails
on the dead horses that were lying about, and were eating with
such pleasure and heartiness as if they were home at mother's.
Nor did some corpses in the neighborhood of our improvised camp
disturb us. There was only a lack of water and after having eaten
thirst began to torment us.

Soon afterwards we continued our march in the scorching midday
sun; dust was covering our uniforms and skin to the depth of almost
an inch. We tried in vain to be jolly, but thirst tormented us
more and more, and we became weaker and weaker from one quarter
of an hour to another. Many in our ranks fell down exhausted,
and we were simply unable to move. So the commander of our section
had no other choice but to let us halt again if he did not want
every one of us to drop out. Thus it happened that we stayed behind
a considerable distance, and were not amongst the first that were
pursuing the French.

Finally, towards four o'clock, we saw a village in front of
us; we began at once to march at a much brisker pace. Among other
things we saw a farm cart on which were several civilian prisoners,
apparently snipers. There was also a Catholic priest among them
who had, like the others, his hands tied behind his back with
a rope. Curiosity prompted us to enquire what he had been up to,
and we heard that he had incited the farmers of the village to
poison the water.

We soon reached the village and the first well at which we
hoped to quench our thirst thoroughly. But that was no easy matter,
for a military guard had been placed before it who scared us off
with the warning, "Poisoned"! Disappointed and terribly
embittered the soldiers, half dead with thirst, gnashed their
teeth; they hurried to the next well, but everywhere the same
devilish thing occurred---the guard preventing them from drinking.
In a square, in the middle of the village, there was a large village
well which sent, through two tubes, water as clear as crystal
into a large trough. Five soldiers were guarding it and had to
watch that nobody drank of the poisoned water. I was just going
to march past it with my pal when suddenly the second, larger
portion of our company rushed like madmen to the well. The guards
were carried away by the rush, and every one now began to drink
the water with the avidity of an animal. All quenched their thirst,
and not one of us became ill or died. We heard later on that the
priest had to pay for it with his death, as the military authorities
"knew" that the water in all the wells of that village
was poisoned and that the soldiers had only been saved by a lucky
accident. Faithfully the God of the Germans had watched over us;
the captured Belgians did not seem to be under his protection.
They had to die.

In most places we passed at that time we were warned against
drinking the water. The natural consequence was that the soldiers
began to hate the population which they now had to consider to
be their bitterest enemies. That again aroused the worst instincts
in some soldiers. In every army one finds men with the disposition
of barbarians. The many millions of inhabitants in Germany or
France are not all civilized people, much as we like to convince
ourselves of the contrary. Compulsory military service in those
countries forces all without distinction into the army, men and
monsters. I have often bitterly resented the wrong one did to
our army in calling us all barbarians, only because among us---as,
naturally also among the French and English---there were to be
found elements that really ought to be in the penitentiary. I
will only cite one example of how we soldiers ourselves punished
a wretch whom we caught committing a crime.

One evening---it was dark already---we reached a small village
to the east of the town of Bertrix, and there, too, found "poisoned"
water. We halted in the middle of the village. I was standing
before a house with a low window, through which one could see
the interior. In the miserable poverty-stricken working man's
dwelling we observed a woman who clung to her children as if afraid
they would be torn from her. Though we felt very bitter on account
of the want of water, every one of us would have liked to help
the poor woman. Some of us were just going to sacrifice our little
store of victuals and to say a few comforting words to the woman,
when all at once a stone as big as a fist was thrown through the
window-pane, into the room and hurt a little girl in the right
hand. There were sincere cries of indignation, but at the same
moment twenty hands at least laid hold of the wretch, a reservist
of our company, and gave him such a hiding as to make him almost
unconscious. If officers and other men had not interfered the
fellow would have been lynched there and then. He was to be placed
before a court-martial later on, but it never came to that. He
was drowned in the river at the battle of the Meuse. Many soldiers
believed he drowned himself, because he was not only shunned by
his fellow soldiers, but was also openly despised by them.

We were quartered on that village and had to live in a barn.
I went with some pals into the village to buy something to eat.
At a farmer's house we got ham, bread, and wine, but not for money.
The people positively refused to take our money as they regarded
us as their guests, so they said; only we were not to harm them.
Nevertheless we left them an adequate payment in German money.
Later on we found the same situation in many other places. Everywhere
people were terribly frightened of us; they began to tremble almost
when a German soldier entered their house.

Four of us had formed a close alliance; we had promised each
other to stick together and assist each other in every danger.
We often also visited the citizens in their houses, and tried
to the best of our ability to comfort the sorely tried people
and talk them out of their fear of us. Without exception we found
them to be lovable, kindly, and good people who soon became confidential
and free of speech when they noticed that we were really their
friends. But when, at leaving, we wrote with chalk on the door
of their houses "Bitte schonen, hier wohnen brave, gute,
Leute! " (Please spare, here live good and decent people)
their joy and thankfulness knew no bounds. If so much bad blood
was created, if so many incidents happened that led to the shooting
by court-martial of innumerable Belgians, the difference of language
and the mistakes arising therefrom were surely not the least important
causes; of that I and many others of my comrades became convinced
during that time in Belgium. But the at first systematically nourished
suspicion against the "enemy," too, was partly responsible
for it.

In the night we continued our march, after having been attached
to the 21-centimeter mortar battery of the 9th Regiment of Foot
Artillery which had just arrived; we were not only to serve as
covering troops for that battery, but were also to help it place
those giants in position when called upon. The gun is transported
apart from the carriage on a special wagon. Gun-carriage and guns
are drawn each by six horses. Those horses, which are only used
by the foot artillery, are the best and strongest of the German
army. And yet even those animals are often unable to do the work
required of them, so that all available men, seventy or eighty
at times, have to help transport the gun with ropes specially
carried for that purpose. That help is chiefly resorted to when
the guns leave the road to he placed in firing position. In order
to prevent the wheels from sinking into the soil, other wheels,
half a yard wide, are attached round them.

These guns are high-angle guns, i. e., their shot rises into
the air for several thousand yards, all according to the distance
of the spot to be hit, and then drops at a great angle. That is
the reason why neither hill nor mountain can protect an enemy
battery placed behind those elevations. At first the French had
almost no transportable heavy artillery so that it was quite impossible
for them to fight successfully against our guns of large caliber.
Under those conditions the German gunners, of course, felt themselves
to be top-dog, and decorated their 21-centimeter guns with inscriptions
like the following, "Here declarations of war are still being
accepted."

We felt quite at ease with the artillery, and were still passably
fresh when we halted at six o'clock in the morning, though we
had .been marching since two o'clock. Near our halting place we
found a broken German howitzer, and next to it two dead soldiers.
When firing, a shell had burst in the gun destroying it entirely.
Two men of the crew had been killed instantly and some had been
seriously wounded by the flying pieces. We utilized the pause
to bury the two dead men, put both of them in one grave, placed
both their helmets on the grave, and wrote on a board: "Here
rest two German Artillerymen."

We had to proceed, and soon reached the town of Bertrix. Some
few houses to the left and right of the road were burning fiercely;
we soon got to know that they had been set alight because soldiers
marching past were said to have been shot at from those houses.
Before one of these houses a man and his wife and their son, a
boy of 15 or 16, lay half burnt to cinders; all had been covered
with straw. Three more civilians lay dead in the same street.

We had marched past some more houses when all at once shots
rang out; they had been shooting from some house, and four of
our soldiers had been wounded. For a short while there was confusion.
The house from which the shots must have come was soon surrounded,
and hand grenades were thrown through all the windows into the
interior. In an instant all the rooms were in flames. The exploding
hand grenades caused such an enormous air pressure that all the
doors were blown from their hinges and the inner walls torn to
shreds. Almost at the same time, five men in civilian clothes
rushed into the street and asked for quarter with uplifted hands.
They were seized immediately and taken to the officers, who formed
themselves into a tribunal within a few minutes. Ten minutes later
sentence had already been executed; five strong men lay on the
ground, blindfolded and their bodies riddled by bullets.

Six of us had in each of the five cases to execute the sentence,
and unfortunately I, too, belonged to those thirty men. The condemned
man whom my party of six had to shoot was a tall, lean man, about
forty years of age. He did not wince for a moment when they blindfolded
him. In a garden of a house nearby he was placed with his back
against the house, and after our captain had told us that it was
our duty to aim well so as to end the tragedy quickly, we took
up our position six paces from the condemned one. The sergeant
commanding us had told us before to shoot the condemned man through
the chest. We then formed two lines, one behind the other. The
command was given to load and secure, and we pushed five cartridges
into the rifle. Then the command rang out, "Get ready! "

The first line knelt, the second stood up. We held our rifles
in such a position that the barrel pointed in front of us whilst
the butt-end rested somewhere near the hip. At the command, "Aim!"
we slowly brought our rifles into shooting position, grasped them
firmly, pressed the plate of the butt-end against the shoulder
and, with our cheek on the butt-end, we clung convulsively to
the neck of the rifle. Our right forefinger was on the trigger,
the sergeant gave us about half a minute for aiming before commanding,
"Fire!"

Even to-day I cannot say whether our victim fell dead on the
spot or how many of the six bullets hit him. I ran about all day
long like a drunken man, and reproached myself most bitterly with
having played the executioner. For a long time I avoided speaking
about it with fellow-soldiers, for I felt guilty. And yet what
else could we soldiers do but obey the order?

Already in the preceding night there had been encounters at
Bertrix between the German military and the population. Houses
were burning in every part of the town. In the market place there
was a great heap of guns and revolvers of all makes. At the clergyman's
house they had found a French machine-gun and ammunition, whereupon
the clergyman and his female cook had been arrested and, I suppose,
placed immediately before a court-martial.

Under those conditions we were very glad to get out of Bertrix
again. We marched on in the afternoon. After a march of some 3
miles we halted, and received food from the field kitchen. But
this time we felt no appetite. The recollection of the incidents
of the morning made all of us feel so depressed that the meal
turned out a real funeral repast. Silently we set in motion again,
and camped in the open in the evening, as we were too tired to
erect tents.

It was there that all discipline went to pieces for the first
time. The officers' orders to put up tents were not heeded in
the slightest degree. The men were dog-tired, and suffered the
officers to command and chatter as much as they liked. Every one
wrapped himself up in his cloak, lay down where he was, and as
soon as one had laid down one was asleep. The officers ran about
like mad shouting with redoubled energy their commands at the
exhausted soldiers; in vain. The officers, of course had gone
through the whole performance on horseback and, apparently, did
not feel sufficiently tired to go to sleep. When their calling
and shouting had no effect they had to recourse to personal physical
exertion and began to shake us up. But as soon as one of us was
awake the one before had gone to sleep again. Thus for a while
we heard the exhortation, "I say, you! Get up! Fall in line
for putting up tents!" Whereupon one turned contentedly on
the other side and snoozed on. They tried to shake me awake, too,
but after having sent some vigorous curses after the lieutenant---there
was no lack of cursing on either side that evening---I continued
to sleep the sleep of the just.

For the first time blind discipline had failed. The human body
was so exhausted that it was simply unable to play any longer
the rôle of the obedient dog.